Scientists relieved as Joe Biden wins tight US presidential election (Nature) [View all]

[eppur_se_muova]

The new president has the opportunity to reverse four years of anti-science policies — but he has a hard road ahead as he inherits a nation divided.

Jeff Tollefson

Joe Biden will soon be president of the United States, and scientists the world over are breathing a collective sigh of relief. But concerns remain: nearly half the country voted for President Donald Trump, whose actions have repeatedly undermined science and scientific institutions. Biden will have his work cut out for him in January as he takes the helm of a politically polarized nation.

“Our long national nightmare is over,” says Alta Charo, a bioethicist at the University of Wisconsin Law School, quoting president Gerald Ford’s famous 1974 remarks about his predecessor Richard Nixon’s scandal-ridden term. “I couldn’t say it any better than that.”

Despite votes still being counted and legal challenges from Trump and his team in some states, major media outlets in the United States declared Biden the victor on 7 November, after confirming that he won Pennsylvania and captured enough electoral college votes to claim victory. Once Biden takes office on 20 January, he will have an opportunity to reverse many policies introduced by the Trump administration that were damaging to science and public health. This includes actions on climate change, immigration and the COVID-19 pandemic, which could claim more than a quarter of a million lives in the United States before Trump leaves office in January.

Researchers are hopeful that much of the damage can be repaired. With Trump out of the picture, says Pervez Hoodbhoy, a physicist and nuclear-proliferation specialist based in Islamabad, “instead of dog-eat-dog, maybe we will have a modicum of international cooperation, greater adherence to laws and treaties, more civility in politics across the globe, less ‘fake news’, more smiles and less anger”.
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“It is testament to the strengths and resilience of US science that it has weathered the past four years,” says James Wilsdon, a social scientist at the University of Sheffield in the UK. “It can look forward now to a period of much-needed stability and support from [Biden’s] administration.”
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quite a bit more: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03158-8?



As I noted in response to a post by NNadir some time ago, it is interesting that Nature placed this article under the heading 'News', not 'Opinion'. Evidently the folks at Nature concluded that 45's willful destruction of American science institutions was an established fact, not a matter of opinion, and that it was no longer appropriate to politely pretend people hadn't noticed.